1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to Ethernet physical layer (“PHY”) devices. More particularly, and not by way of any limitation, the present invention is directed to a system and method for providing a system reset via an RMII PHY device to cards distributed through a system.
2. Description of Related Art
Signaling servers (“SSs”) are employed in telecommunications networks to handle various signaling functionalities such as, e.g., call control, session control, and radio recourse control. An SS handles routing and maintains the status of calls over the network. It takes the requests of user agents that want to connect to other user agents and routes these requests with the appropriate signaling.
At least one previous SS design was implemented using a proprietary bus interface. When a slave card, such as a link card, installed in a slot on a backplane of the SS needed to be reset, a system reset signal was transmitted from an administrative controller of the SS via the proprietary bus interface to reset the card. Such a system reset may be issued when a card needs to be booted and placed in service or when it needs to be taken out of service, for example. It is imperative that every card installed in every slot of every backplane of the SS is capable of being reset based on whatever communication connection exists between the administrative controller and the cards.
As previously mentioned, in a prior SS system, the communications connection was implemented with a proprietary interface. In contrast, in one embodiment of a current SS system, the communications connection is implemented using an Ethernet connection. Moreover, in this embodiment, the Ethernet controller employed requires a Reduced Media Independent Interface (“RMII”) standard, rather than a Media Independent Interface (“MII”) standard, for which a reset circuit has previously been developed and deployed. The main differences between the two interfaces is that in RMII, the clock speed is 50 MHz and the data width is 2 serial lines, while in MII, the clock speed is 25 MHz and the data width is 4 serial lines.
Therefore, what is needed is an RMII-based reset circuit for use in a SS employing an Ethernet controller using an RMII PHY for the communications connection between the administrative controller and the link cards installed therein.